Describing themselves as “a disruptive open source software company”, Open-Xchange - a team made up of some of the key developers of OpenOffice, has announced the launch of OX Documents, a cloud-based office
productivity suite, featuring OX Text, an in-browser word processing
tool.

Early April will be the time for OX Text to be first released under the GNU General Public License 2 and Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. It will be joined by Presentation and Spreadsheet to complete the OX Documents Suite later in 2013.

OX Text will the the web-based version of OpenOffice, with the members of the original OpenOffice team joining Open-Xchange. The software offers direct editing capabilities for Microsoft Word .docx
files and OpenOffice or LibreOffice .odt files. Multiple users can view
and edit the same document in real time by sharing editor’s rights held
by a single user at a given time, allowing for structured collaboration.
OX Documents also provides viewing support for all major file formats.

A key feature of the program is non-destructive support of Microsoft
Office and OpenOffice or LibreOffice file formats, which means XML-based
documents can be seamlessly read, edited and saved back to the original
format at a level of quality and fidelity previously unavailable with
browser-based text editors.

Open-Xchange will provide commercial licenses that offer support based subscriptions to telecom and mobile carriers, hosting companies,
cloud providers, VAR’s and SI’s to enable their SaaS, Managed Services
and mobile App strategies. But for individuals and organizations that want to use OX Text for non-commercial reasons, such as charities, they can use the software for totally free.